It seems that the Bat Conservation Trust has been successful in making the Church of England provide bats a safe space in which to hang – full inclusion for bats – by having churches install bat flaps in their stained glass windows.
It’s encouraging to see that there is at least one organisation that has a convincing perspective on an enduring purpose for English churches.
From here:
Bat conservation is damaging churches not just physically but financially and cannot be sustained, Environment Minister Richard Benyon MP was told today.
The cost of replacing one small piece of a leaded window, for example, increased from £5 using plain glass to £140 when fitting a lead ‘bat flap’ was required by the Bat Conservation Trust (BCT) – four weeks’ collection in the rural parish church of Wiggenhall, St Germans.
Leaving interpretation of the law on bat conservation largely to the BCT is bringing the European Habitats Directive into disrepute to the detriment of endangered species more generally, warned a Church of England delegation led by Second Church Estates Commissioner Sir Tony Baldry MP, with representatives of Natural England.
“I remain puzzled as to why our churches are treated as if they were uninhabited barns. They are not,” said the Rt Revd Graham James, Bishop of Norwich.
I trust that the BCT is not discriminating in favour of the C of E but is applying the same privilege to synagogues and Muslim temples.
Didn’t anyone tell the BCT that High Churchmanship means incense and bats hate the smell of incense (perhaps because they are familiars of the devil)? There are idiots and then there are bureaucratic idiots.